Bio

Building industry-changing distributed systems Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege to work on some amazing, industry-changing technology alongside world-class engineers in a variety of roles. I got my start in Motorola’s Government group (later sold to General Dynamics) working on complex command and control systems for US and allied countries. As I wrote software for these systems I became familiar with some large codebases and realized that I cared deeply how they were structured, and gradually took on software and systems architect positions in major programs. For several years I was also a consulting architect tasked with helping multiple struggling projects get back on track toward technical, cost and customer satisfaction targets. At Choice Hotels International, I was the lead architect on a new cloud-based reservation system built from microservices, using technologies like AWS Apache Cassandra. I was offered the privilege to become a co-author of O’Reilly’s Cassandra: The Definitive Guide and produced the 2nd and 3rd editions. Through my involvement in the Cassandra community came the opportunity to join DataStax Developer Relations to help a worldwide audience of developers be successful in building data-intensive systems. During my first few years at DataStax, I led the developer advocates and the development of a new developer website. Recently I’ve moved back into full-time engineering, working on open source projects like Stargate.io and K8ssandra.io that are revolutionizing how development teams worldwide interact with data.